A common problem that arises is to quickly and cheaply find accurate and useful information of interest, such as answers to a wide variety of types of questions. As a result, a variety of information sources and other ways to locate information of various types have been developed, but they are often time-consuming and/or expensive to use, as well as having other problems such as providing only limited types of information, providing information that is inaccurate and/or irrelevant, etc. For example, encyclopedias and reference librarians may provide one possible source of answers, but can be time-consuming and expensive (if they are even available), and are limited in the types of information to which they have access, such as to historical and other reference information of mass interest. Similarly, while online search engines more recently are available to provide information of various types, they often provide information that is inaccurate or irrelevant, are difficult or impossible for many users to effectively use, and are also similarly limited in their ability to retrieve various types of information. For example, such information sources may be ineffective in providing answers to many topical and special-interest questions, such as a list of restaurants of a particular type in a given geographic location that have provided great service during the prior month, suggestions on how best to use particular features on a particular new digital camera that was recently released, or an identification of a physical store in a geographical area that currently have a particular item in stock at a price that satisfies specified criteria.
Other examples of sources of at least some types of information include email lists and newsgroups that are devoted to highly specialized topics, which may allow people to ask questions and later receive responses related to those topics. However, such lists or newsgroups typically do not exist for many subjects of interest, and may be difficult or impossible for infrequent users to identify if they do exist. Even if an appropriate list or newsgroup exists and a user with a question locates it, it may be difficult for many users to submit questions in a form that is acceptable to specialized culture of the list/newsgroup, and responses from others may take days (if they occur at all) and may be hard to find among other activity on the email list or newsgroup. Moreover, such responses are often inaccurate or otherwise inappropriate, since there is typically no feedback mechanism to identify reliable and experienced users (or to penalize users who intentionally or otherwise provide inappropriate responses), and there is typically no monetary or other reward to incentivize the most experienced and diligent users to participate and provide accurate information. In recent years, specialized answer services have developed on the Internet, which may allow questions over varying ranges of topics to be submitted and answered by paid employees or affiliated researchers, but typically suffer from at least some of the same drawbacks as email lists and newsgroups (e.g., limited to only certain topics, responses are slow, responses may be inaccurate, little or no incentives for the most experienced users to provide the most accurate and useful answers, etc.), and may further be costly to use.
Thus, it would be beneficial to provide a solution that enables people to easily find information of interest (e.g., answers to questions), such as to quickly and cheaply obtain accurate answers to questions on a wide range of topics.